One of the first lessons parents teach young children about safety when by themselves in public is to simply “never talk to strangers.”

However, teenagers who meet new people in the vast world of cyberspace are giving out more personal information than ever — raising questions about safety online.

The poster child for unsafe Web sites over the past few months has been MySpace.com — a popular social networking site.

The Web site offers myriad features — message boards, games, music players and blogging — designed to draw the attention of younger visitors. The Web site has more than 87 million users — a quarter of which are minors — and has dramatically increased since launching in January 2004.

MySpace has become a target of parents, schools and law enforcement officials concerned that teens who hang out on the Web site are susceptible to sexual predators.

In hopes of giving the parents the tools to recognize what content their children are searching online, the San Ramon Library Foundation and San Ramon Police Department decided to host a workshop on Internet safety Tuesday.

Librarian Susan Weaver says that the need for a class on the Internet habits of children can be found on a daily basis at the Dougherty Station Library.

“Every afternoon the computers are inundated with middle school and high school age children checking their MySpace accounts,” she said.

Rosemary Dukelow, a librarian at the Livermore Civic Center Library, says that she notices a lot of children on MySpace and playing games over the Internet as well.

“We have been promoting Internet safety since day one,” she said, adding that the library refers families to GetNetWise, a Web site that promotes Internet safety.

Weaver said that because of the trend in Dougherty Valley toward having younger families that are more “techno-savvy,” it is important to give parents as many tools as possible to keep children safe.

Teenagers are more likely to get into trouble online than younger children, since they are more likely to explore the nooks and crannies of cyberspace, to reach out to people outside of their immediate peer groups, a press release on the “Stranger Danger” workshop said.

The MySpace site itself has initiated some changes in hopes of making the site more conducive to safety.

Proposed changes made by MySpace — set to take effect next week — would restrict users over the age of 18 from requesting to be added as a “friend” of a user registered as a 14 or 15 year old, unless they know either the user’s full name or e-mail address.

Any user will still be able to access a partial profile of younger users by searching for attributes like a display name. However, users under 18 will still have full access to a user’s profile and MySpace has no mechanism for verifying the age of its members.

Partial profiles display gender, age and city, while full profiles describe hobbies, schools and any other intimate details a user wishes to reveal.

The site already prohibits kids 13 and under from setting up accounts. Partial displays are shown for those registered as 14 or 15 years old.

The changes come on the heels of a lawsuit by a 14-year-old girl against MySpace and its parent company News Corp. — saying she was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old MySpace user.

Earlier in the month, a 16-year-old girl who duped her parents into getting her a passport flew to the Middle East to meet a 20-year-old man she met through the site. U.S. officials in Jordan persuaded her to go home.

MySpace officials say the new restrictions have long been planned and are unrelated to recent events.

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